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The Golden Substack
All my life, I have tried to keep the various parts of my existence in separate places. Work, motherhood, writing, community, I wanted them all to be walled off from one another. When I was younger, I didn’t even like when friends from different areas of my life met one another. I remember being at a football game in college and seeing that happen and feeling acute unease. I had to restrain myself from running down the bleachers and separating them.
I’m a deeply private woman who speaks and writes about very personal experiences. Part of the way I preserve my emotional balance is to have areas of my life that are tucked away, just for me and a small circle of my closest friends and family. Which, fundamentally, works for me.
When I was in college, I read The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. It was published in 1962 and wasn’t in fashion when I read it in the 80s, but it had a big impact on me because the narrator has that same insistence on separating parts of her life. (There’s a workmanlike summary of the book here.)
The narrator has multiple notebooks, all different colors, in which she writes about aspects of her life. Each separate volume is about something different. The Golden Notebook is the goal, a place in which she will write everything, a bringing together of her thoughts, observations, and dreams, with stories about various seasons in her life. That unified, integrated, Golden Notebook seemed brave, subversive, and slightly terrifying to me.
I started this substack to be about work. Not because work is my preferred topic, but because my job as an executive coach means I think quite a bit about work, and it’s relatively easy for me to come up with 900 words a week about work. 900 words a week, week in and week out, since July 2022 has built 138 posts, which is over 125,000 words, like a book and a half.
And that’s not counting the Bad Boss Brief, which I do with Eugene S. Robinson which is close to 50 episodes and also about work.
I write about other things, like grief and getting older. Those topics are more interesting to me, they are my other notebooks. The personal essays get more engagement, are harder to write and tough to do every week.
LIsten for more
Get full access to The Consigliera Papers at consigliera.substack.com/subscribe
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By Stephanie PeiroloAll my life, I have tried to keep the various parts of my existence in separate places. Work, motherhood, writing, community, I wanted them all to be walled off from one another. When I was younger, I didn’t even like when friends from different areas of my life met one another. I remember being at a football game in college and seeing that happen and feeling acute unease. I had to restrain myself from running down the bleachers and separating them.
I’m a deeply private woman who speaks and writes about very personal experiences. Part of the way I preserve my emotional balance is to have areas of my life that are tucked away, just for me and a small circle of my closest friends and family. Which, fundamentally, works for me.
When I was in college, I read The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. It was published in 1962 and wasn’t in fashion when I read it in the 80s, but it had a big impact on me because the narrator has that same insistence on separating parts of her life. (There’s a workmanlike summary of the book here.)
The narrator has multiple notebooks, all different colors, in which she writes about aspects of her life. Each separate volume is about something different. The Golden Notebook is the goal, a place in which she will write everything, a bringing together of her thoughts, observations, and dreams, with stories about various seasons in her life. That unified, integrated, Golden Notebook seemed brave, subversive, and slightly terrifying to me.
I started this substack to be about work. Not because work is my preferred topic, but because my job as an executive coach means I think quite a bit about work, and it’s relatively easy for me to come up with 900 words a week about work. 900 words a week, week in and week out, since July 2022 has built 138 posts, which is over 125,000 words, like a book and a half.
And that’s not counting the Bad Boss Brief, which I do with Eugene S. Robinson which is close to 50 episodes and also about work.
I write about other things, like grief and getting older. Those topics are more interesting to me, they are my other notebooks. The personal essays get more engagement, are harder to write and tough to do every week.
LIsten for more
Get full access to The Consigliera Papers at consigliera.substack.com/subscribe